Building a little data capture into our admissions process

As I mentioned in my previous post about mapping our digital landscape, we’re not letting the lack of CRM completely get us down. We have…

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Trends Across Time: An ASK Fashion Tour

As a follow-up to our ASK-guided gallery tours for Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving and Pride Month, the ASK team has created a new…

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Tiny Cards, Big Fun: What Impact?

In 2017 we partnered with educational start-up Duolingo and their new digital platform, Tinycards, to produce fun and educational art history flashcard decks. 2 years,…

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Showing Our Pride: A New Themed ASK Tour

“Celebrate Pride Month! Our team of friendly experts guide you on a tour of LGBTQ+ artists and themes throughout the Museum via text message, chatting…

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Visitor Study: ASK Brooklyn Museum

The second evaluation completed by Pratt grad students last semester examined the ways visitors were using ASK. Partially inspired by wanting to know if people were participating…

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Visitor Study: Frida Kahlo

In my last post, I posited that although we don’t have a CRM, we are gathering data in the ways we can to help inform…

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Mapping the Data Landscape (Without a CRM)

One of my personal and professional goals for the Visitor Experience and Engagement department is to make more data-driven decisions. We’ve written A LOT about…

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Everyone Wants To Take Frida Home: ASK and Frida Kahlo

Our exhibition Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving closed on May 12 and we’re taking a moment to review our ASK engagement for this show….

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Labels Provide an Entry Point for ASK (We Think)

In my last post I detailed how I knitted together thematic connections across different collections and what effect in-gallery labels have on object engagement, but…

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What encourages people to ASK about certain objects?

While I wanted to learn more about visitors complete interactions through the app, without the ability to systematically dive into chats, I chose to focus…

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What kinds of questions do users ASK us about art?

I ended my last post with a brief exploration of what people are asking about via ASK. I was particularly interested in going beyond the…

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Not just for “Appearances” sake: ASK and Frida Kahlo

Our major exhibition for this spring, Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving, has been very well-attended and well-received so far. It has also posed unique…

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Initial Insights from ASK Data

During my first semester as the Pratt Visitor Experience & Engagement fellow I was able to learn a significant amount about ASK user behavior—despite limitations…

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Mining Data With Limited Tools

In my last post, I laid out some of the challenges working with the current metrics dashboard and the data exporting process for ASK. Despite…

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Diving into ASK Data

As the Pratt Visitor Experience & Engagement Fellow, I was tasked with conducting a deep dive into ASK-related data. There are several research questions that…

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Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes: ASK and “David Bowie is”

From March through July 2018, the Brooklyn Museum was the home of the multimedia exhibition David Bowie is. It was the twelfth and final stop…

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We’ve been silent, but we’ve been busy

I will admit, I’m a little embarrassed that it’s been more than a year since our last post. Rest assured, while we may have been…

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3

It’s Not About “More” Anymore

For the majority of this project, we have been fixated on use rate. After all, it’s easy to track and is a very clear measurement…

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1

ASK and Young Museum Visitors: On the Hunt

Sometimes we plan and execute ASK-related projects on a long timeline, but occasionally a project will happen organically and almost take us by surprise. Using…

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What happens when you put ASK on a kiosk? You learn a few things.

One of the questions we’ve had since the beginning of the project was if ASK is appropriate for a mounted kiosk of some kind. We…

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Making Connections in “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern”

One thing we’ve learned through all our ASK pilots and testing is that people love an incentive. Free drink tickets finally helped us to attract…

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Pilot 3: Texting

Last week we wrapped up our final planned pilot project to help determine the direction for ASK 2.0.  Another somewhat obvious solution to the challenge…

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Pilot 2: ASK on Demand

As promised, this week’s post is on our second pilot in search of our direction for ASK 2.0. For the first pilot, we provided devices…

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ASK 2.0: Providing Devices? Maybe.

As I prefaced in my post last week, while ASK has been successful from an engagement standpoint, we are stalled at between 1-2% use rate….

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Dedicated Staff Help…But It’s Not Enough

Radio silence from us usually means we’re up to something and this time is no different. Since our last post in May, we’ve been looking…

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Timing is Everything

One of the things we learned from ERm’s evaluation was that ASK users really appreciate when the responses to their questions are well timed (i.e….

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2

Before and After: ASKing about American Art

This month marks one year since the reinstallation of the Museum’s fifth-floor American art galleries, formerly known as “American Identities: A New Look.” This anniversary…

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Shifting Traffic Patterns

Early on in the course of ASK, Shelley and I noticed some really interesting patterns related to where people tended to use the app. While…

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Georgia O’Keeffe: ASKing Modern

Our special exhibition “Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern” opened on March 3, and—not surprisingly for a show about such a famous artist—it’s turned out to be…

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1

Labels Do Heavy Lifting for ASK

As part of our original messaging with soft launch, we deployed gallery labels advertising the app. This first round included questions that we hoped would…

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Is Bigger Better? Some Most-ASKed About Artworks

In a recent conversation with colleagues from the Peabody Essex Museum, Sara and I fielded a question that frequently arises: which works of art do…

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Free drink anyone?

If you’ve ever visited the Brooklyn Museum on a Target First Saturday, you know what a special experience we try to provide for our visitors….

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ASK App + Group Tours: Shaping the Visitor Experience

In my last post I wrote about our process for deciding which collection highlights to include in ASK’s new self-guided tour, titled Highlights and Hidden Gems….

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2

Fresh Eyes Provide Insight on ASK

Our entire ASK program has been built upon regular user testing and evaluation, which we’ve always completed ourselves…until now. Since we’ve been trying for over…

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ASK App + Group Tours: Making Hard Choices

Earlier this week, Sara introduced the topic of ASK’s new collaboration with our Group Tours office and our efforts to shape the content of our…

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ASK App + Group Tours: A Balancing Act

If you’ve been following our blog, you know we spend a great deal of time focusing on getting our ASK app in more people’s hands….

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Tiny Cards, Big Fun

Since time immemorial, nerds have been listing things and memorizing them for fun. 2,000 years ago, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder published his Natural…

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1

We’re Baaaack!!!!

I know it’s been pretty much radio silence here since my last post about the MUSE Awards, but rest-assured, we have been busy! Over the…

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MUSE x 2: Thank you!

I’m delighted to share that my suitcase was a little bit heavier on my return trip from the annual meeting of the American Alliance of…

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The ASK Team is Visible Once More

If you’ve been following our posts lately, you’ve noticed our tech team has been doing some amazing behind-the-scenes work in anticipation of our Android launch…

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Leveraging Machine Learning for Better Efficiency

Extremely smart people dedicated to the field of machine learning have made tools that are not only better, but far more accessible than they have…

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ASK Snippets Integrated Into BKM Website

A number of things happen after a visitor has a chat with our ASK team. At the end of each day, the ASK team takes the…

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1

Image Matching Now Supporting iBeacon Results

Every second counts when the ASK team is responding to visitor questions. With that in mind, a few weeks ago we looked into how we…

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Revising our ASK Engagement Manual

It’s been a year since the original ASK team arrived at the Museum, and we’ve been reflecting on all the ways ASK has evolved over…

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Selectively Flying Blind After Android User Testing

ASK Brooklyn Museum for Android is now available on Google Play. We had one early quandary, but this was a fairly straightforward development process. That is, until we…

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Chatting About… Chats

As the ASK Team gears up for the app’s Android launch in April and expands to two full-time members and four part-time members, it seems…

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Lessons Learned Staffing ASK

Hard to believe that it’s been a full year since we began the initial hiring process for our ASK team. We’ve accomplished so much in…

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How Important is Anonymity When Asking a Question?

As reported earlier, the Android version of our ASK app is due to launch in April. For the most part, the app will look and…

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Code Release: Going from iOS to Android Solving iBeacon Issues Along the Way

Our Android release is coming in April. I’m often asked about our strategy to expand into Android when 74% of our users are on iOS…

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Getting Visibility on the iBeacon Problem

It’s been just over a year since I wrote about the realities of installing ibeacon to scale. Our ASK app, funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, has been active…

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What Do We Want from the ASK Wiki?

In one of my previous posts, way back in March 2015, I discussed our initial plans for a shared research database (an “ASK wiki”) which…

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Asking with a New Set of Eyes

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to anyone that getting out of your own head every once in a while can have great benefits. We’ve…

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All in a Day’s Work

In our last post, Sara discussed our ongoing definition and refinement of the ASK app’s engagement goals and our recent collaborative workshop with some of…

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Getting It All on Paper

We developed ASK based on the premise (determined by over a year’s worth of pilot projects) that our visitors want to talk about art with…

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Sleuthing Clues about the Future from Visitor Interaction

Things have been pretty quiet over here for a while—have you noticed?  We had been blogging our progress on ASK weekly and in my last post…

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Seeking a Home on the Range

As summer draws to a close, so does our testing for the location of our ASK team. You may remember the results from our earlier testing in…

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Measuring Success

We all struggle with how to measure success. We’re thinking a lot about this right now as we begin to put the pieces together from…

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A Personal Invitation to ASK

Knowing what we know about our visitors, we figured pretty early on that we would need to offer face time with staff as part of…

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Messaging is Harder

Perhaps its the nature of an agile project, or just this agile project, but at each stage of ASK Brooklyn Museum we find ourselves facing…

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Building is easy, but launching is hard.

If you think about it, building a project is fairly straightforward. It’s a one way street of sorts; a controlled process with steps involved, tests we can run, and timelines…

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The Pedagogy of a Text Message: First Response

In my last post, I discussed our “opening response” and slight tweaks to make that a better experience.  Our “first response” (the first message the…

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The Pedagogy of a Text Message: Opening Prompt

What is the pedagogy of a text message conversation?  Can you actually have a pedagogy of texting? If so, what does it look like? How…

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ASKing About Art with Museum 2.0

Sara and I couldn’t be happier to have ASK featured on Museum 2.0, so instead of blogging our own progress this week we’ll point you…

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Performance Optimization, Not Premature Optimization

At the Brooklyn Museum, we like to take inspiration from many things. After recently watching “Mad Max: Fury Road,” we realized to make our servers…

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Managing Expectations

We’ve talked a lot about how user expectations helped shape our implementation. There are times when it’s incredibly valuable to listen to your users, but there…

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Graphics Tie It All Together

When we first began thinking about the lobby reconfiguration, the need for flexible and moveable was paramount and all of our discussions with the design…

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Clearer Choices for Better Flow

Shelley and I like to cast a wide net when looking for inspiration and ideas, often looking outside the museum sector from the customer experience…

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Solving Three Clicks to the Art

As you’ve been reading, ASK Brooklyn Museum isn’t just about an app—it’s an initiative that seeks to re-envision our visitor experience from top to bottom. That “top”…

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Scaling Back

In every project there’s always a moment where the timeline starts to shrink. You start to look at your launch date and the to do list (ours is…

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Location, Location, Location

Last month we had the pleasure of introducing the six members of our audience engagement team, the specialists who will be engaging with visitors via…

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Agile by Design

As I introduced in a previous post, SITU Studio was brought on board to design a mobile, flexible, and temporary set of furniture components that…

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We’re Only Human

When you’ve got any tool that is designed to answer questions the danger is that people think it’s an automated system; with ASK we need to…

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Fighting the Three Dots of User Expectation

In my previous post, I talked a lot about agile development and where we failed it. Agile has also thrown us some serious curves in…

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Learning from Agile Fails

As we march toward our June launch for ASK, it’s a good moment to look back at some of the issues we’ve faced along the way….

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Connecting with Curators

Our ASK team has a number of exciting challenges ahead of them. How do you communicate information about art in an informed and engaging way…

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A Day in Training

I know that everyone on the team agrees—spending time learning about the collection is a privilege, an honor, and a lot of fun. Training started…

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Amassing Encyclopedic Knowledge

ASK is a tool that allows any museum visitor using the Museum’s app to have the opportunity to be in direct and immediate contact with…

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Meet the Audience Engagement Team

I am happy to announce that we’ve identified and hired six individuals who are knowledgeable, experienced at connecting people with art, and excited to take…

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Inside Out

The most passionate debates in our office have centered around how we are using geofencing in our upcoming app to present different information to users dependent upon…

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Iterating on the ASK Mobile Experience

The ASK mobile app has gone through many design iterations and has continually evolved in a quest to to offer an exceptional user experience. In…

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Lessons Learned Running User Testing

We have an incredible opportunity in front of us; the folks who will be using our ASK app are coming through the door every day, so we…

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Working out the Wiki

The most basic goal of the ASK app is to connect visitors to works of art in the museum. Although the conduit for this connection…

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Who are we looking for in an Audience Engagement Team?

I’ve just joined the Bloomberg Connects project as the Audience Engagement Lead. I will be heading the team that will be answering inquiries from visitors…

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Finding the Right People to ASK

On the surface, it might seem that our Bloomberg Connects project is all about tech. After all, this particular Bloomberg Philanthropies initiative is specifically for…

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Aspiring To Code Nirvana Through Tests

1 + 1 = 2? Obvious right? How about (2 + 2 x 4)^2? That’s a little more complicated but not so bad either. Over…

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13

The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale

Location aware technology as part of Bloomberg Connects is pretty vital.  We use it to tell the staff answering questions which gallery a visitor is standing…

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Benefitting from Code Prototypes

The dashboard—the web application our audience engagement team will use to answer incoming questions—is a complex application with many parts and before we hit the…

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SITU Studio (re)Envisions our Lobby as Part of Bloomberg Connects

We are excited to announce that the Brooklyn based design firm, SITU Studio, will be working with us to create a new, more friendly and…

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Pikachu, I choose you!

Preparing for a Post-Password Future with Pokemon Cards

Every year a gathering of hackers and information security professionals convene in Washington, DC to discuss how awful and broken the state of computer security…

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1

Challenges using the iPod Touch for a Mobile Testing Environment

In previous blog posts we’ve discussed the results of our initial user testing. In this blog post we’ll talk about the process and challenges of getting…

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Fighting Code Chaos with the Right Framework

From the outset we knew that the dashboard—the web application our audience engagement team will use to answer incoming questions—was going to be a huge…

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One API to Rule Them All

In the web development world, RESTish APIs (Application Programming Interface) have slowly become the de facto standard by which different computing systems are used to…

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1
Sticky Notes

Agile Baby Steps

By and large, most software in the world is made to a spec enshrined into immutability, then interpreted differently by various parts of the teams…

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User Testing ASK with our Members

Earlier this week I covered how we have been testing the ASK app internally. Today I am going to talk about how we user tested…

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Preparing for User Testing

I was very excited by the prospect of user testing in the field when I started working on the Bloomberg Connects project. As a web…

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6

Configuring the All-in-One Windows 8 PC into a Gallery Kiosk

In getting our ASK iPad pilot into full swing for Bloomberg Connects we needed to nail down how we were going to present the answers…

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2

Metrics Tell (Part of) the Story

As Shelley mentioned in her previous post, we’ve tweaked our comment kiosks over the past year or so, shifting them to an ask functionality only…

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Piloting the Complexities of Migrating iPad Kiosks into ASK

Brian and Jennie have been talking about our forthcoming mobile application, which is one of the public facing components of our Bloomberg Connects project, but…

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The Design Spin Cycle

When I started as Web Designer for the museum in January, I assumed I had been hired for a website redesign. Rookie mistake. As you’ve…

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3

Positioning Visitors with iBeacons

When Apple released iOS7 in 2013 one of the new features introduced was iBeacon. This technology would now enable Apple devices to pick up broadcasting…

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Simply ASK

In previous Bloomberg Connects blog posts we’ve described the iterative process of determining how we can engage the visitor, enhancing their museum experience. The ASK app (our…

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2

Going Responsive with Agile Planning

“Three Simple Truths” from The Agile Samurai by Jonathan Rasmussen: 1. It is impossible to gather all the requirements at the beginning of a project….

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1

Local Matters

If you’ve been reading the blog lately you know we’ve been taking stock of our digital efforts and making considerable changes. I’ve been discussing what’s not…

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Leveraging Technology for Connection

As Sara mentioned in her previous posts, we’ve been careful in this project to let visitor need pave the way toward an idea. It was…

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Piloting a Future Visitor Experience

A series of internal meetings got us set on the path for this project, but we wanted to test it with our visitors. To do…

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Taking Assumptions with a Grain of Salt

As Shelley introduced in her last post, we have the very ambitious goal of overhauling our visitor experience through an initiative funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies…

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Visitor Powered Technology to Create a Responsive Museum

We are incredibly excited that Bloomberg Philanthropies has funded a three-year initiative as part of Bloomberg Connects and it gives us the opportunity to significantly improve…

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Teaching next-gen art making for the next generation of artists

Since we first made use of our 3D printer, we’ve grown the number of things we’ve used it for, ranging from creating a participatory experience…

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Clear Choices in Tagging

Remember my post on Social Change? We’ve been evaluating our digital projects with a careful eye toward what’s working and what isn’t.  At this juncture,…

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The nicest error page we hope you never see.

Cloud Watching

A few years ago we moved away from hosting our website infrastructure from its dusty basement to the Cloud. This brought a certain peace of…

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29

Social Change

There comes a moment in every trajectory where one has to change course.  As part of a social media strategic plan, we are changing gears…

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Robert Nardi photographing Senwosret III

How about a nice game of 3D printed chess?

Earlier this year, we started exploring how 3D printing could enhance the visitor experience and began by introducing it on that month’s sensory tour. In…

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The Dinner Party (Heritage Floor; detail)

Writing Women Back Into History

As I embarked on The Dinner Party Wikipedia project, my first step was to conduct a thorough assessment of the presence of these 1,038 women…

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Saul Bolton in front of the Brooklyn Museum.

Welcome Saul at the Brooklyn Museum

I am just delighted to announce the wonderful news that this fall, Brooklyn’s acclaimed Michelin star restaurant, Saul, will move from its current location in…

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The Dinner Party

Ending the ongoing cycle of omission

The conversation about sexism on Wikipedia is longstanding. In 2011, The New York Times Room for Debate took up the question of why there are…

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Figure of a Hornblower

“Africanizing” Wikipedia

As I’ve been leading the current Wikipedia initiative at the Brooklyn Museum, I have recently started working with our curator of African Art, Kevin Dumouchelle,…

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Latoya Ruby Frazier Interview PDF

A Conversation With Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier

One of the best parts of working in contemporary art is that we often work closely with artists, and are able to build relationships over…

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WikiAfrica logo

Collaborating with WikiAfrica

In September 2012, a representative from WikiAfrica approached us about working with them to provide Africa-related content to the Wikimedia Foundation’s websites. As the WikiAfrica profile…

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Wikipedia logo

Adding Our Voice to the Wikipedia Chorus

Our online collections have a relatively small number of visitors compared to the whopping 470 million unique visitors to Wikipedia each month. Every day, hundreds…

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In Conversation iPad Kiosk

Moving Toward a Conversation

If you’ve ever heard me speak at conferences you know that one of our most successful technology projects is also one of our simplest—the comment…

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Arts of the Islamic World gallery

The Reinstallation of the Asian and Arts of the Islamic World Galleries

If you’ve visited the second floor of the Museum recently, you may have noticed that it looks considerably more bare than normal. Big changes are…

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George Grosz, Otto Dix and World War I

In my last post, I highlighted several of the many prints in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection that, like those now on view in the Käthe…

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German Expressionist Prints at the Brooklyn Museum

The current exhibition in the Herstory Gallery of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art features the politically engaged work of early twentieth-century artist…

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Looking for love?

I’ve been at the Brooklyn Museum for about a year-and-a-half now, which is also as long as I’ve been a resident of our fair borough….

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Fine Lines Sensory Tour

Teaching with a 3D Simulacrum

When Shelley and David brought up the idea of 3D printing, my not-so-inner tech geek and my really-blatantly-outer education geek got pretty excited.  As Shelley…

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Join us at #table17

The Brooklyn Artists Ball is coming up next week and it’s an event that we are super excited about; this year’s ball celebrates Brooklyn and…

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Replicating a 19th Century Statue with 21st Century Tech

My first exposure to the world of 3D printing took place in 2009 approximately 500 feet under the Earth’s surface in a former missile silo…

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Double Pegasus

3D Printing for Accessibility

In the last year, we’ve seen a lot happening in the museum space with 3D printing.  The Smithsonian is working on what looks like a enormous project,…

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The End of the Season

Working together with the ARCE project team we got a great deal accomplished this season in preparing the site to open to visitors. Most of…

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Our last week of excavation

Our last day of excavation was February 28, but we still have work to do. Since we are leaving Luxor next week, this will be…

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Old projects, new projects

Jaap’s wife, Egyptologist Julia Harvey, arrived on February 15, completing this season’s small team. Julia has agreed to take on the pottery, with which she…

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Our first week

According to the late French scholar, Agnes Cabrol, these 3 badly damaged sphinxes sitting east of Chapel D date stylistically to the reign of Ramesses…

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Back at Mut – How things have changed!

Our first day at the site this year was February 6, so most of this first posting will be about how the site has changed…

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Connecting Cultures

Armed with Input

As you may recall, we kicked-off a visitor study about Connecting Cultures back in May with an updated approach based on a bit of trial-and-error…

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Yoko Ono's Wish Tree

Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree

Since the 1990s, Yoko Ono has created her work Wish Tree in locations all over world.   In honor of Ono’s acceptance of the Brooklyn Museum’s…

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Mosque Lamp 21.484

Othoniel’s Sculptures and Glass from the Islamic World

Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way just closed here in Brooklyn a few days ago, but The Secret Happy End (2008) is still on view in the…

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Yeon Ji Yoo

Join us in Celebrating GO

It’s hard to believe we are here after dozens of artist and voter meetups throughout the summer; an exhilarating open studio weekend that resulted in…

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Making Choices to Create an Exhibition

Once we had our group of the ten most nominated artists, Eugenie and I set out on our part of the collaboration. We visited the…

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GO installation

Creating a Framework to Collaborate with the Public

You have been following us from the 1708 studios to 9,457 nominations to 10 nominees to the 5 featured artists. Let’s take a look at…

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Going Gangnam Style in Support of Ai Weiwei

In late October, acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei and friends performed a parody of the “Gangnam Style” video by the South Korean rapper PSY. The video,…

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Henri Bendel Window Display

Candy Garments at Bendel’s Holiday Windows

If you want to see a fun window display go over to the Henri Bendel at 721 Fifth Avenue at 56th Street. Their designers used…

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Our GO Featured Artists

Since our announcement of our top ten nominated artists in late September, Eugenie Tsai (John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art) and I have visited their…

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William Hogarth’s Election series

After more than a year of partisanship, pundits, and polls, as well as a seemingly never-ending stream of gaffes, accusations, and distortions, Election Day has…

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Respite from Hurricane Sandy

As we all pulled ourselves together after the storm, those of us who managed to make it to the Museum yesterday were delighted to discover…

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Double Cosmetic Tube

Looking at Glass

Jean-Michel Othoniel has noted that he is fascinated and inspired by fragile glass objects that have survived for centuries, imbued with the unknown histories and…

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GO Nominated Artists

Your Ten Nominated Artists

After approximately 147,000 studio visits to 1,708 artists, and then 9,457 nominations, we have our top ten nominated artists. In alphabetical order: Aleksander Betko, Cobble…

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Mickalene Thomas (American, born 1971). A Little Taste Outside of Love, 2007

What is hands-on art history?

This fall, for the first time since the program began, Gallery/Studio is going to offer a class in art history… sort of. We refer to…

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Heat Map

Moving Toward an Exhibition with 9,457 Nominations

As you saw in Shelley’s previous post, we were thrilled about the level of participation over the open studio weekend. At the same time, we…

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Open Studio Weekend Visitation Statistics

As the nomination phase of GO continues this week, now is a good time to review the weekend and share some statistics about weekend visitation…

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GO See Art in Brooklyn This Weekend!

Our borough-wide open studio weekend is finally just days away! On September 8th and 9th, more than 1800 artists across 46 neighborhoods in Brooklyn will…

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Getting Beyond the Like Button

The open studio weekend is just 16 days away and as we get closer, it’s worth taking a look at some of the participatory design choices we’ve…

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Red Hook Houses and GO Open Studios

Partnering with NYCHA for GO

GO is a project that’s rooted in community, but “community” is one of those words that can have a lot of different meanings. As Sharon…

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The Open Studio Model

As we’ve noted in our posts, the inspiration for GO came from two primary sources: ArtPrize and the long and burgeoning tradition of open studio…

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ArtPrize in 2010

Learning from ArtPrize

As we continue to move forward throughout the summer, it seems fitting to talk about the inspiration behind GO.  I’ve already mentioned that the Brooklyn…

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Resurrected Abelam Bark Painting Returned to View

When you look up at the large, towering Abelam bark painting in our exhibition Connecting Cultures, you wouldn’t guess that it had been bedridden for…

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Inquiring Minds… Learn As They Go

You may recall my previous post, which introduced our two-part visitor study about the Connecting Cultures installation. Well, we are a little better than half-way…

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1861 Artists Will Open Their Studio Doors Sept 8-9

When Sharon and I first started discussing the project that would become GO, one of our sources of inspiration was a map that the Brooklyn…

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Why Artist Registration for GO Continues to Surprise Me

As Sharon mentioned in her post yesterday, we continue to get a lot of questions and wanted to answer a few of them prior to…

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Why I Hope Artists Will Participate in GO

I have received a wide range of questions about GO from artists. Some of the more skeptical ones have included “So, it’s a contest?” and…

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Connecting Cultures Installation View

Exhibiting Architecture in a Salon

Yesterday conservator Kerith Koss introduced readers to a late 16th- or early 17th-century Ottoman tile panel (39.407.1-.54), is currently on view in Connecting Cultures: A…

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After Treatment, Panel of Tiles

Connecting with Conservation

If you’ve been through Connecting Cultures, you’ve probably wondered at the number of diverse objects.  You may not be aware, however, of the planning and…

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Mummy Mask of a Man Consisting of the Face Only

A New Addition from our Old Collection

Every museum strives to enrich its collection even further, but acquiring new objects is not always possible. Luckily, our storerooms have much to offer and…

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Team GO

Going Local with a Distributed Network

You’ve probably heard that if Brooklyn were its own city, we’d be the fourth largest in the United States. With a land mass of 73…

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Open Studio Weekend September 8-9, 2012

Calling All Brooklyn Artists!

When Shelley and I first started brainstorming the ideas that have now become GO, we were thinking about how to build upon some of the…

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Connecting Cultures

Inquiring Minds

Over the summer months you may notice an increased number of staff stationed in the museum lobby. One of these staff members may approach you,…

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GO: a community-curated open studio project

Let’s GO

Over the years many people have asked me if we’d do Click! again and my general response has been to say that we wouldn’t do a…

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07.447.501

Meet Another Charming Lady

All of us were a little sad to see “Bird Lady” go, even if it is only for a brief period of time, but we…

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Santi Moix

Santi Moix

Perched high on a lift in the fourth floor contemporary galleries, Brooklyn-based artist Santi Moix is drawing directly on the wall with charcoal to create…

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Smartglass case

Advances in Exhibition Casework

In my last post, I discussed the wall murals and the state-of-the-art photo enlargements in Connecting Cultures. Today, I’d like to talk about a few…

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Sanson Atlas Table of Contents

Connecting Cultures Through Books!

The presence of three books in the new Connecting Cultures installation  gives me a welcome opportunity to talk about these key works that are in the…

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Sunset from the Brooklyn Museum roof.

A Sunset for 1stfans

It’s been roughly three and half years since Will Cary and I started the 1stfans Membership program at the Museum; come July, the program will…

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07.447.505

Where is our Bird Lady?

Many of you may be wondering where our beloved Female Figurine, nicknamed the “Bird Lady” is. One of the stars of our Egyptian collection, she…

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Egyptian Eye

The Big Picture(s)

As Kevin mentioned in his last post, Connecting Cultures is presented in thematic sections: Places, People, and Things, in addition to an Introductory Center. Since…

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Arnold Lehman at the Connecting Cultures Desk

Say Hello

Yesterday, Arnold Lehman, our Director, initiated a new initiative that coincides with the opening of the installation Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn. He was…

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6
Senwosret III

Vetting Wikipedia for WikiLink

In Shelley’s previous post, she announced the installation of QR codes installed in exhibitions that lead visitors to Wikipedia articles for further information. These QR…

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WikiLink

WikiLink (QR Redux)

You may remember my blog post a while back, QR in the New Year?  In it, I talked about our QR code testing and reported…

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Nick Cave's Soundsuit, 2008

Shifting the Paradigm in Connecting Cultures

Connecting Cultures, a new installation that includes works from the Brooklyn Museum’s many diverse collections, has now opened on the first floor in the Great…

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Keith Haring Journal

Doodling as Communication

One of my favorite discoveries since Keith Haring: 1978-1982 opened is how much Haring thought. Journals dating back as far as his middle school years…

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Brooklyn Museum Shop

Shop ’til you drop and follow us on Pinterest!

If you’ve visited us sometime over the last year, you probably noticed a lot of construction activity that is part of a multiphase transformation of…

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Brooklyn Museum in Google Art Project

Google Art Project Deux

Starting today, you can find the Brooklyn Museum in Google Art Project. I’m here in Paris at the launch for the second phase where more…

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Mary Lucier

Playing House: Working with Artists

In the exhibition Playing House four artists, Betty Woodman, Ann Chu, Ann Agee and Mary Lucier, install their own artwork into and around several period rooms…

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Portraits of a People

A Recent Donation from Camille and Luther Clark

The Brooklyn Museum Library collection has recently been enriched with the donation of several rare items of African American art given by Camille and Luther…

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Comment

What’s Behind the Green Doors?

On the first floor of the Museum, if you look to your left while waiting for the double elevators, you will notice two wide green…

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QR Signage

QR in the New Year?

A while back, I reported that we were in the process of a trial period with QR codes.  We’ve just taken a look at the…

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Kiosks in Split Second

In the Gallery vs. Online: How a Split Second Can Differ

One of the questions people always ask me is how web differs from what happens in the building and that’s a difficult thing to get…

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Nayika Awaits Her Lover

Split Second: A Curator’s Reaction to the Results

I’ve had a lot of time to mull over the results of the Split Second, so here are a few of my thoughts—roughly one week…

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Led by Songhur Balkhi and Lulu the Spy, the Ayyars Slit the Throats of Prison Guards and Free Sa'id Farrukh-Nizhad

Split Second: Why Indian Paintings?

I am listed as a contributor to the Split Second project, but I really wasn’t the brains behind it; I’m just the person who okayed…

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Raw/Cooked: Lan Tuazon

What drew you to the Egyptian Galleries?

One morning in late September, I went to Lan Tuazon’s studio in Bushwick with Pierce Jackson, who is making the videos for Raw/Cooked. Lan was…

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Split Second Stats #7: Contentiousness

A big part of experiencing art is talking about it. Sometimes (or, uh, frequently) artworks are successful because they provoke disagreement, and along with that…

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Portrait of a Man

Treatment of Portrait of a Man

In preparation for the paper rotation that recently went on view in our second floor, the works were examined and, if necessary, stabilized before going…

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Youth and Beauty iPad Kiosks

Proving a Point with Google Images

When most of us think about the roaring twenties, we envision scenes of flappers cutting loose on the dance floor, bustling cities filling with new…

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Latino List

Behind the Scenes on The Latino List

If you’ve visited The Latino List exhibition, you may have wondered how Timothy Greenfield-Sanders creates such monumental photographs. It all starts with the camera. For…

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1

Split Second Stats #6: Subconscious Effects

In the previous post I closed by noting that depending on what participants were asked to do, visual complexity could affect their ratings. Indeed, we…

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Terpenning family

Calling Rapaljes, Rapeljes, Raplees and all descendants!

Get ready for some surprising encounters when you visit the Brooklyn Museum’s beloved period rooms this February, when several of the rooms will be the…

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Drop-in Drawing Workshops

It’s important to draw in the Museum

Sculptors and painters draw constantly. Architects, botanists, designers, and many a traveling student have been known to constantly have a sketchbook in hand. But what…

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Packer Institute, Brooklyn

Project CHART at the Brooklyn Museum

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has been an important supporter of several initiatives to make the Brooklyn Museum’s collection much more accessible to…

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2

Split Second Stats #5: Complexity

Complexity is an important factor in the evaluation of art. In all of the previous Split Second blog posts I’ve talked about how the complexity…

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What’s the deal with the pumpkins?

If you have walked through Raw/Cooked: Kristof Wickman then you have probably noticed the abundance of cast pumpkins. As the Coordinator for Raw/Cooked, I had the…

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Lee Mingwei

Give a Flower, Share Your Experience

As Eugenie noted in her post, The Moving Garden is installed in our Rubin Pavilion and the artist invites the visitor to take a flower…

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The Power of Flowers

A long granite table top filled with roses now welcomes visitors as they enter the Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway.  You might be tempted to…

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QR Codes on TSA Signs

QR Code Conundrum

I’ve long been a critic of QR Codes.  When I look around, I see low adoption rates, technical hurdles for end users and some really…

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iPad Kiosk Use

The Avatar and the iPad: Lessons Learned

As Jenny mentioned in her previous post, we had an interactive running on a series of iPads in Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue Skinned Savior and now that…

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1

Split Second Stats #4: Engagement

In previous Split Second blog posts, we looked at the effects of thin-slicing, textual information, and gender. Put another way, we were studying the effects…

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Latino List in the App Store

How has your culture shaped your life and accomplishments?

All eyes will be on you this fall when you enter the Great Hall and encounter the twenty-five massive photographic portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders that…

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A Tree Blossoms in Brooklyn

In preparation for the exhibition Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk—An Introspective, conservators took part in preparing and installing Blossom, 2010, a recent acquisition to the collection….

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Detail of Book of the Dead of Sobekmose

Repairing the Book of the Dead

Repairing papyrus can be a little like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. In order to make sense of the many small pieces at hand, we…

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Trinity Church

On-the-Road Research, or What Curators Do On Their Summer Vacations

One of the projects I’ve been working on is Fine Lines: American Drawings from the Brooklyn Museum, an exhibition of about 100 of our pre-1945…

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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

An interesting post popped up at ReadWriteWeb yesterday that evaluates our social media efforts across platforms—the author questions if we are spread too thin and…

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Breathe In, Breathe Out – you can relax now

A yoga teacher once told me, “you have everything you need and more than you could possibly imagine.” As an over scheduled, stressed out, on-the-go,…

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Quake map

We felt the earth move under our feet

Yes folks. The quake was felt here at the Brooklyn Museum. Unlike our colleagues in California, Tennessee and even Indianapolis, we Brooklynites do not live…

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4

Split Second Stats #3: Gender and Information

In the last blog post about Split Second, I talked about how adding extra information about a work changed what people thought about it. In…

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Red Escape II

African Innovations Now Open!

After many months of object review, checklist creation, cross-departmental consultation, budgeting, conservation, design, research, writing, photography, editing, construction, painting, installation, and lighting, I am pleased…

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Elvis Mask for Nyau Society

Elvis is in the building

Elvis is at the Brooklyn Museum and not where you’d expect to find him—in the new installation of the Museum’s African galleries, African Innovations. Brooklyn’s…

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Split Second paintings in the Conservation Lab

Many Hours for a Split Second

With the initiation of the project Split Second, Joan Cummins, Curator of Asian Art selected a very large number (185) of works from the Museum’s…

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Overskirt

Please Touch

Textiles are a crucial element to the story I wanted to tell in African Innovations. Immensely varied in media, form, content and use, textile arts…

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Varaha Rescuing the Earth

The Original Avatars: An Introduction to Vishnu’s Earthly Manifestations

The Vishnu exhibition that’s on view here right now includes a large section on the god’s avatars.  The show introduces the idea of the avatar…

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Case Layout

Installation in Progress

One of the many adaptations that moving the African collection into the South Gallery on the First Floor has required has been adjusting to a…

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